The Incredible Survival Story of Green Beret Nick Rowe in Vietnam

In October 1963, a small group of American advisers moved through the canals of Vietnam's Mekong Delta with a civilian irregular defense group unit. The mission seemed routine. Instead, it turned into an ambush that would vanish three US Army Special Forces soldiers into the dense jungle of the U Minh forest. Among them was First Lieutenant James Nick Rowe. Captured by the Viet Cong, Rowe disappeared into a brutal prison system deep inside enemy territory. For years, he was held in a bamboo cage, interrogated, tortured, and forced to

survive on discipline, deception, and sheer endurance. What followed would become one of the most remarkable survival stories of the Vietnam War. When Rowe finally returned home after more than 5 years as a prisoner, the lessons of his captivity would reshape how the United States military prepared its soldiers for the possibility of capture. Who was James Nicholas Rowe? What was his story in Vietnam? What was his legacy? Hello, I'm Colin Heaton, former history professor, Army and Marine Corps veteran, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History.

Beginning of the toughest 26 days in Marine Corps history. With confidence in our armed forces. 36th President of the United States died this afternoon. There are children and women in here, and they call it off. Colonel James Nicholas Nick Rowe was born in McAllen, Texas, on February 8th, 1938. He graduated from McAllen High School in 1956 and later attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1960.

He went on to serve with US Army Special Forces Vietnam Provisional, which had been formed in Saigon in 1962. Rowe was assigned as the executive officer of Detachment A-23, Fifth Special Forces Group under Captain Humberto R. Versace, in An Xuyen province in the Mekong Delta. His Vietnam story turned brutal quickly. On October 29th, 1963, only a few months after arriving in country, Captain Humberto Rocky Versace, First Lieutenant Nick Rowe, and Medic Sergeant Daniel Pitzer were accompanying a civilian irregular defense group company on an operation along a canal. The team departed from the camp at Tan Phu and moved toward the village of Lacour to drive out a small enemy unit that was reportedly establishing a

command post there. When they reached the village, they found the enemy gone and pursued them, only to fall into an ambush at about 1000 hours. The fighting continued until 1800 hours, when enemy reinforcements arrived and overwhelmed the company. During the battle, Versace was badly wounded, and he, Pitzer, and Rowe were all captured. The three prisoners were later photographed together in the U Minh forest, known as the forest of darkness for propaganda purposes.

They could not be identified as Special Forces soldiers and used their assigned cover stories as civil engineers. However, it became evident early on that Versace, who spoke fluent French and Vietnamese, would be especially difficult to control. He refused to accept the communist philosophy of revolution and resisted indoctrination during torture and interrogation. He was eventually isolated from the group, placed in his own small cage, beaten, and starved in an attempt to break him. But Versace never broke.

Rowe and Pitzer saw Rocky at intervals during their first months of captivity and could see that his resolve remained intact. By January 1965, Versace's steel gray hair had turned white. Despite being extremely thin and suffering from tropical diseases, Versace still attempted to escape. The Viet Cong had enough, and on Sunday, September 26th, 1965, Liberation Radio from Hanoi announced the execution of Rocky Versace and fellow POW Kenneth Roraback in retaliation for the deaths of three terrorists in Da Nang. Two American

aggressors were executed yesterday in the liberated area of South Vietnam by order of the South Vietnam Liberation Armed Forces Command. They are Captain Humbert R. Versace and Sergeant Kenneth M. Roraback, who had committed many crimes against the South Vietnamese people. A later news article retracted the report and stated that the executions were faked, but the Army did not reopen an investigation. In the late 1970s, information regarding this execution became classified and is no longer part of the public record. Versace and Roraback were listed as missing in action and presumed dead. But Rowe had his own problems, and Pitzer disappeared.

During most of his more than 5 years in captivity, he was held in a cage and tortured for information. He managed to maintain his cover for years by solving engineering problems he had learned in case he was challenged. While trapped in a bamboo cage like an animal, he endured 62 months of captivity and relied upon discipline and deception to survive. Sergeant Pitzer was eventually released from Cambodia on November 11th, 1967. When the Viet Cong later learned of Rowe's true value and identity from a US prisoner list, they decided to kill him after 5 years. From that moment forward, Rowe understood that his execution was imminent. Several high-ranking Viet Cong officials stared down at Lieutenant Rowe.

They held out a piece of typed onion skin paper. They wanted him to write his confession. Rowe told them to go to hell in his fluent Vietnamese. During his time in captivity, he suffered from chronic dysentery, wet beri-beri, malaria, and fungal skin infections. He was never given medical treatment. Nick Rowe was scheduled to be executed in late December 1968 and was marched for 11 days. On the day he was being led to the Viet Cong district headquarters for execution, he and his small group of guards were caught on the edge of an

American B-52 Arc Light saturation bombing raid. The guards scattered, leaving Rowe with only one remaining escort. Knowing he had nothing to lose, Rowe waited for the right moment. When the guard carelessly moved in front of him, Rowe bludgeoned the guard with a log and escaped. Alone in the jungle, he soon heard the sound of UH-1 Iroquois Huey helicopters arriving to drop off American soldiers. Taking the chance, Rowe ran into a clearing where the helicopter spotted him and one pulled him aboard, still wearing his black prisoner pajamas.

Once he was on board, Rowe gave his name and rank. The pilot asked him, "Are you Nick Rowe?" He answered yes, and his identity was quickly verified. The air control officer on the flight turned out to be an old West Point classmate. Rowe then learned that he had been promoted to major during his 5 years, 4 months in captivity. After returning to the United States, Rowe underwent a lengthy hospital stay and a full intelligence debriefing before returning to active duty. On December 27th, 1969, he married Jane Caroline Benson. In 1971, he published his autobiography, Five Years to Freedom, which was based on a diary he had secretly kept while a prisoner, writing portions of it in German, Spanish, Chinese, and his own

coded system to deceive his captors. Rowe left the Army to run for Texas State Comptroller against Bob Bullock in the 1974 election. After losing that campaign, he moved to Virginia to raise jumping horses. He co-authored The Washington Connection with Robin Moore, which was published by Condor Press in 1977, and in the same year, Little, Brown and Company published his first novel, The Judas Squad. In 1981, he returned to military service as a lieutenant colonel to become chief of the Green Beret training at Camp McCall, Fort Bragg. In 1985, he was placed in command of Fort Bragg's First Special Warfare Training Battalion, a position he held until 1987.

He was assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he taught a POW/MIA planning and training program based on his experience, and was chief of the Army's revision of survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training unit based upon his unique experience. Survival schools had existed since World War II, but Rowe's contribution was different. After returning to active duty in 1981, he helped develop a far more realistic resistance training program for high-risk personnel, especially in the special operations community and pilots. Army history links the formal SERE department at the JFK Special Warfare Center directly to lessons from Vietnam POWs and to Rowe's experience. While Rowe was on a secret assignment in Greece, for which no details were

available, Delta Force located him, moved in, secured the area, and extracted Rowe. They had received reports that Vietnamese communist agents were tracking his movements and planning an action against Rowe. Robert Mountel, a retired Special Forces Colonel and a former commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, explained, confirming that he was a target when he went over there because of his dealings with the North Vietnamese and his time as a prisoner. They had him on their list. In 1987, Lieutenant Colonel Rowe was made chief of the Army division at the Joint United States Military Assistance Group headquarters in Quezon City, Philippines, where he joined then US Marine Corps Colonel and Vietnam Medal

of Honor recipient James E. Livingston as both officers assisted in training and supporting Philippine forces. In this capacity, Rowe worked closely with the CIA and was involved in its program to penetrate the NPA, or Communist New People's Army, with ties to Vietnam and China. The Communist, however, never forgot Rowe. There was an outstanding contract on him, and the US State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau had received reliable information on the Communist Party's intensified efforts to locate and execute deep penetration agents working for the CIA inside the Philippines Communist organization.

The seriousness of this threat contrasted significantly with the State Department's having ignored Rowe's own warnings through his own trusted local intelligence network that the NPA was planning major terrorist acts and assassinations against US military advisers and high-profile civilians. The State Department also knew that a number of these agents had already been captured, interrogated, and executed. As a result of the intelligence and his analysis of the situation in the Philippines, Rowe wrote Washington warning that a high-profile figure was about to be hit and that he himself was number two or number three on the hit list, along possibly with Livingston, who is also a potential high-value target, and it was clearly

known that both and others were in danger. The State Department ignored Rowe's letter and apparently never warned him about the seriousness of the threat. Intelligence sources say Rowe was a classic expendable, that he was not warned because he likely would have tried to safely get out any agents he personally knew of inside the NPA or Communist Party. Undoubtedly, there were some who didn't want to lose those assets, an intelligence source said anonymously. One reason such assets may have been deemed important enough to not alert Rowe to the threat was that the Defense Intelligence Agency was receiving

information on Cuban involvement with the NPA. That would prove fatal. Shortly after 7:00 a.m. on April 21st, 1989, a small white car pulled alongside Rowe's gray, chauffeur-driven vehicle in a traffic circle in the Manila suburb of Quezon City. M-16 rifle and.45 caliber pistol fire came from the window of the white car. 21 bullets struck Rowe's car, and one hit Colonel James Nick Rowe in the head, killing him instantly. The hooded NPA killers had ties to Communist Vietnamese networks connected to Rowe's earlier captivity during the Vietnam War.

It took the Communist nearly 25 years, but they finally silenced Nick Rowe. Despite the clear danger posed to Rowe and other intelligence operatives, he was not provided with a heavily armored vehicle. One reason for this was that the budget cuts for the Defense Attaché system for 1989 had resulted in a 72% cut in the DAS's vehicle armoring program, causing the program to be canceled the previous year. In May 1989, US Veteran News and Report reported that according to a source who had served under Rowe, the Vietnamese Communist had a mole inside who very likely collaborated with the Philippine insurgents to achieve that goal. In June of 1989, from an NPA stronghold

in the hills of Sorsogon, a province in southern Luzon's Bicol region, senior cadre Celso Minguez told the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine that the Communist underground wished to send a message to the American people by killing a Vietnam veteran. Filipino Donato Continente was initially convicted as the murderer of Rowe and given a life sentence on February 27th, 1991. But upon review, the Supreme Court ruled in August 2000 that he was only an accomplice and lowered his sentence to 14 years. He was recommended for release three times under the Ramos administration's amnesty program, but Continente remained behind bars, allegedly because of pressure from the US government. So, in plain terms, Rowe's career mattered because he was not just a

Vietnam POW who made it out. He turned that experience into doctrine. His escape made him famous. His post-war work helped shape how later American special operators and air crews were trained to survive capture and evade capture. But Rowe's death did not end his life's mission. He launched a program to get his friend and hero, Captain Versace, a posthumous Medal of Honor. The fight for Rocky Versace's Medal of Honor was a long, ugly, decades-late campaign to get the Army and Congress to recognize what fellow POWs already knew.

Versace had shown Medal of Honor level courage in captivity, but the system did not get him there the first time. In 2002, he finally received the Medal of Honor posthumously, becoming the first Army POW honored for actions in captivity in Southeast Asia. A big reason the recognition lagged is that the strongest first-hand witness, Nick Rowe, was himself a POW until his 1968 escape. After Rowe got home, he told Versace's story. He met with President Richard M. Nixon and pushed for a Medal of Honor nomination. That effort did not succeed. Instead, Versace was awarded the Silver Star in 1971.

The nomination was ultimately downgraded during the military review process. The later campaign was driven by a coalition, not one lone crusader. Versace's family kept his story alive for years, and in 1999, a local veterans and friends group, the Friends of Rocky Versace, relaunched the effort. By 2002, his brother, Steven Versace, credited to the group, Versace's West Point class of 1959, and Special Operations Command with helping move the decision. The key obstacle was time. Medal of Honor cases are normally constrained by statutory time limits, and Versace's case was decades old.

Congress broke the logjam by including language in the fiscal year 2002 National Defense Authorization Act authorizing review and waving the time barrier for the award. That is what finally opened the door to the upgrade from Silver Star to Medal of Honor. Rowe started the push because he was Versace's only surviving witness, and years later the effort was revived by Versace's family and friends. This was when the POW/MIA issue began to gain momentum. Of the seven US Army Special Forces personnel captured in He Pua and Tan Phu, the fates of only Versace and Wiraback remain unknown.

President George W. Bush presented the medal on July 8th, 2002. In the White House ceremony, Bush called Versace the first Medal of Honor given to an Army POW for actions taken during captivity in Southeast Asia. The next day, the Army inducted him into the Pentagon Hall of Heroes. Colonel James N. Rowe was himself awarded the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts for his service. His legacy endures in the many thousands of men who experienced the course he envisioned, and there is no doubt that he saved lives with his intense training. His character and personal sense of honor pushed him to not forget his friend, Captain Humberto Rocky Versace's sacrifice.

Colonel James Nicholas Nick Rowe is fittingly buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Rest in peace. When you come down to the loyalties, and when you take the oath, and you come in the military, you raise your hand, and you pledge to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, you know, even at the risk of your life. Well, you realize that very clearly in a POW camp when it comes down to the risk of your life, because you remember that expendable was written right across those BDUs. And you're no less expendable in a POW camp than you are on the battlefield.

And when you come down to it, hardcore, we go out to do what our country has asked of us. If we're not willing to, we're in the wrong business. Because they tell that to us up front. And if we kid ourselves, particularly in Special Forces, that's the wrong kind of thing to tell ourselves. Thank you for watching this episode of Forgotten History. If you liked what you saw, please click like, share, and subscribe. And if you would like to assist with the ever-increasing cost of production, please consider becoming a channel member and joining our Patreon page.